Citizen of the World

by John English

  Nevertheless, Trudeau and Lévesque shared many views on the need for Quebec’s modernization and, by the mid-winter of 1962, Trudeau had come to respect what Lévesque was doing as a member of the government. However, this amity shattered quickly when Lévesque pressed forward with his campaign to nationalize the hydroelectricity companies, which had long been the symbol of English-Canadian economic dominance in Quebec.49

  The issue was old; its political impact, new. Neighbouring Ontario had state-owned hydroelectricity, but the rich water resources of Quebec were still largely in private hands. The case to nationalize private electricity production and distribution outside Montreal was clear: rates would be made more uniform throughout the province and the ever-growing needs of industry and consumers would be met. The enormous cost to meet these demands would be shifted to the government, to the society as a whole. Nationalization had both political and economic significance. Even though it had been mentioned briefly in the elaborate Liberal platform of 1960, it had remained dormant. Lévesque became impatient with the constant divisions within the Cabinet over the issue and, in February 1962, went out on his own and launched “Electricity Week”—a public campaign in favour of nationalization. Laurendeau enthusiastically supported it; Lesage, however, was wary and at one point stopped speaking to Lévesque because he had breached Cabinet solidarity. Lévesque became “René the red,” a role he played brilliantly during the summer as he struck out against the economic elite. His antagonists inevitably became the Anglo-Canadian business barons, and his arguments ever more nationalist.

  In exasperation, Lesage finally organized a Liberal retreat at a chalet at Lac à l’Épaule. He asked George Marler, a minister without portfolio who, in Lévesque’s words, spoke “French as well if not better than us … [and] represented with exquisite courtesy the most upper-crust of the dominant minority,” to put forward the case against nationalization. In striking emotional and physical contrast, the excitable and passionate Lévesque presented the opposite view, with cigarette and hand gestures animating his talk. When they finished, “all eyes were on the premier, only the twiddling of his pencil belying his air of quiet composure.” To the astonishment of all, Lesage decided to call an election to settle the issue. The election slogan quickly and historically became “maîtres chez nous”—masters in our own house.50

  Trudeau immediately dissented on the policy and, especially, the nationalist slogan. At their Friday night meetings, he strongly attacked Lévesque’s plans. Both have left an account of their confrontation. Lévesque reconstructed the exchange in his memoirs:

  “You say it’s going to cost something like $600 million,” Trudeau would argue, inviting others to register the enormity of the thing. “$600 million, and what for? To take over a business that already exists. It’s just nationalist suspender-snapping. When you think of all the real economic and social progress you could buy with a sum like that!”

  “Yes,” I’d reply, “but a sum like that doesn’t just drop out of the sky for any old project. In the case of electricity, the present assets and the perpetual productivity stand as security. Try to find an equivalent to that.”51

  Lévesque further argued that the control of “such a vast sector of activity” would be “a training ground for the builders and administrators we so urgently needed.”

  Trudeau’s memories are similar. He recalled one night when Lévesque launched into his dream of nationalizing Shawinigan Power just as Premier Godbout had nationalized Montreal Light, Heat and Power during the war years. “I asked,” Trudeau recalled, whether it would not be better to spend the money on education: “He said that it would allow us to create managers and to double employment. But I told him I saw the priorities differently, and the argument began about the use of the term nationalization and I said, at least if you can do it, you ought to speak of socialization, not nationalization.” Trudeau, unlike Marler and the capitalists, did not object to state ownership of hydroelectricity. Indeed, an article he published that June in the McGill Law Journal on “economic rights” went far beyond any of Lévesque’s “socialist” appeals in his campaign that summer to have state ownership in the hydroelectricity sector. Trudeau’s problem was the nationalist rhetoric surrounding the hydro debate. “What he was afraid of,” Lévesque later wrote, “was the mobilizing potential of the word and its power of acceleration, a force one felt might be able to go very far in a society that took a stormy turn.” Lévesque had a point.52

  But Trudeau did too. Trudeau also believed that the highly emotional arguments of the Lesage government were increasingly diminishing both the social scientific and rational analysis of what was best for all citizens in Quebec. Maurice Lamontagne, probably the best-known Quebec economist of the time, shared Trudeau’s views: education was a far better investment than the bricks and mortar of a power plant. Albert and Raymond Breton were also opponents who did not accept Lévesque’s arguments about the creation of a “cadre” of franco-phone professionals. In their view, the poor, the workers, the shopkeepers, and the widows who also spoke French would pay the price for the creation of that cadre—and so would their children. Nor, in Trudeau’s view, was the Lesage government’s “politics of grandeur,” with its “red carpets in Paris” and pretentious titles and trips, more than a diversion from its proper tasks in improving Quebec’s education and infrastructure. Trudeau looked on anxiously as Lesage welcomed the French culture minister, André Malraux, to Quebec like a princely emissary and, in return, accepted invitations to the French president’s palace, where de Gaulle treated him as a honoured and cherished head of state. Trudeau knew Lord Acton’s maxim well, and he saw again how power could corrupt.53

  When Trudeau was asked whether these arguments with René Lévesque broke up the Friday night meetings, he replied, “No, because I was the only one who made them.” Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand apparently were largely silent. André Laurendeau, the neo-nationalist who had called for similar nationalization two decades earlier, supported Lévesque. The meetings came to an end after two years in November 1963, but, as Pelletier later wrote, it was not because of any particular contention at the time. The differences were fundamental, and they had been present at the creation of the meetings in the fall of 1961. But as Lévesque’s nationalist fervour grew, the gap became too great to bridge.54

  In discussing their different points of view, Lévesque’s biographer has argued that Trudeau’s heart was on the left but his stock portfolio made him fall on the right.* Others, including Frank Scott, Stephen Clarkson, and Christina McCall, believe that Trudeau moved towards free-market liberalism in the 1960s in reaction to nationalism, pointing to the fact that Albert Breton’s “public goods” arguments are associated with the free-market neo-classical Chicago school economists. However, Trudeau’s public and private writings at the time as well as Breton’s contemporary association with the federal NDP undermine such claims. Trudeau’s article in the McGill Law Journal was a vigorous attack on the liberal concepts of property, and drew on the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and even the Marxist C.B. Macpherson, not on Milton Friedman and Gary Becker of the University of Chicago. Moreover, based on Trudeau’s own comments, Gzowski called him a “millionaire socialist.” In November 1962 in Cité libre, Trudeau described himself as a “man of the left,” but one who deplored the lack of realism of the NDP. In the upcoming crucial election, he said, the provincial party was not uniting behind the Liberals and was even considering a candidate to oppose René Lévesque, the voice of the left in the provincial government.

  Despite his own opposition to the nationalization of electricity, Trudeau could not understand how any democrat could consider voting against the Liberals, given the unthinkable reactionary alternative. Indeed, he was more supportive of the Liberals in 1962 than he had been in 1960. His major regret after the election was that Lesage would have no “man of the left” to reinforce René Lévesque. He ended with the hope that, after the election, a new Liberal government wo
uld express, with more “realism,” a genuine politics of the left in Quebec.55

  On November 14, 1962, René Lévesque won his gamble, and Jean Lesage his election. These were fateful, terrifying months. In October the world probably came closest to its destruction when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev went “eyeball to eyeball” over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. When Khrushchev “blinked” and backed down, the Canadian federal government began to come undone. Not a minute too soon, thought Trudeau, Marchand, and Pelletier. Marchand had considered joining the Lesage team for the 1962 election, but, unlike in 1960, Lesage did not extend an invitation this time. One reason may have been an angry televised debate between Marchand and Réal Caouette, the Quebec Social Credit / Créditiste leader, who, in the June 1962 federal election, had won an astonishing twenty-six seats in Quebec and reduced John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government to minority status. Jacques Flynn, the Quebec Conservative organizer, correctly analyzed the Social Credit success: “No one had foreseen it … it was a protest, period—a vote against.”56 Caouette’s success was the strongest pillar in Trudeau’s argument that every democrat must vote Liberal in the Quebec election: Caouette represented the broader forces of reaction that threatened to undo the Quiet Revolution that had begun in 1960.*

  In the fall of 1962, Jean Marchand, perhaps wounded by Lesage’s failure to enlist him for the November election, began to talk quietly with Trudeau and Pelletier about running for the Liberals in the next federal election. It would not be long in coming. John Diefenbaker had quarrelled with Douglas Harkness, his defence minister, who had upbraided him for his hesitation as prime minister to support President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Harkness then set off a Cabinet revolt that, at a meeting around the dining-room table at 24 Sussex Drive, nearly forced Diefenbaker from office. Instead, the government fell, an election followed, and Lester Pearson became prime minister—though in a Liberal minority government.57

  Lester Pearson’s government took office on April 22, 1963, but Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, and Pierre Trudeau were not part of it. In the election, Trudeau had firmly supported the federal NDP because of Pearson’s January statement that Canada should respect its previous commitments and accept nuclear warheads from the United States. This stand probably won seats for the Liberals in Ontario and accelerated the demise of Diefenbaker, but it hurt the Liberal cause in Quebec. In Ontario, the historically Tory Globe and Mail and Toronto Telegram swung behind the Liberals. In Quebec, however, Le Devoir and La Presse (which Pelletier edited) both supported the NDP opposition to nuclear weapons.

  The most vitriolic attacks, however, came in Cité libre, where Jean Pellerin, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, and Trudeau condemned Pearson’s stand “as part of a nefarious scheme to sell Canada down the river in return for American campaign funds.” Trudeau’s attack has become legendary, and its virulence has not been exaggerated. Contrary to popular lore, however, he was not the first to describe Pearson as “the defrocked prince of peace.” That derisory gem mocking Pearson’s Nobel Prize for Peace had been coined by his friend Vadeboncoeur, but Trudeau used it to begin his own essay. “Pope Pearson,” he wrote, had decided one morning when eating his breakfast to embrace a pro-nuclear policy and thereby defrocked his own party:

  It mattered little that such a policy had been renounced by the party congress and excluded from its program; it mattered little that the leader acted without consulting with the national council of the Liberal federation, or its executive committee; it mattered little that the Leader forgot to speak to the parliamentary caucus about it, or even to his main advisors. The Pope had spoken; it only remained for the believers to believe.

  The nuclear policy itself was contemptible; the “anti-democratic” character of the Pearson decision, intolerable.58

  Trudeau came close to a conspiracy thesis in interpreting the Pearson action and the fall of the Diefenbaker government. The “hipsters of Mr. Kennedy” had decided that “Diefenbaker must go.” You think I dramatize? Trudeau asked.

  But then how do you think politics are done? Do you think it’s as a mere tourist that General Norstad, the erstwhile supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe, came to Ottawa on January 3 to publicly summon the Canadian government to respect its commitments? Do you think it’s by chance that Mr. Pearson, in his speech on January 12, was able to rely on General Norstad’s authority? Do you believe it was by mistake that the State Department passed on to the newspapers, on January 30, a communiqué reinforcing Mr. Pearson’s position, in which Mr. Diefenbaker was bluntly treated as a liar? Do you think it’s by chance that this communiqué provided the leader of the opposition with arguments he liberally peppered throughout his speech in Parliament on January 31? Do you believe it was by coincidence that this series of events ended in the fall of the government, on February 5? Well then, why do you think the United States would proceed any differently with Canada than with Guatemala, when reasons of state required it, and circumstances lent themselves to it?

  Although Diefenbaker largely supported this interpretation, neither Basil Robinson, his foreign policy assistant at the time, nor Denis Smith, his definitive biographer, agrees. As so often, coincidence and error explain most of what happened. But not all.59

  The Kennedy administration made its detestation of Diefenbaker known publicly. The contempt for the prime minister’s hesitation to endorse Kennedy’s ultimatum to the Soviets—a response that was, in Smith’s words, “honestly ambiguous in the Canadian tradition”—pervades the reports sent from Ottawa by the American ambassador, W.W. Butterworth. When Trudeau wrote his attack on Pearson, he was troubled about the American influence on Canada. Vadeboncoeur was horrified: he identified “Americanization” with the deadening impact of modern technology on the human spirit. In the April 1963 issue of Cité libre, he and Trudeau joined in a virulent attack on the Liberals and, in particular, on Lester Pearson. Trudeau had long considered the prime minister a too willing supporter of American international arrogance.

  On the nuclear issue, Trudeau’s views were shared by Pierre Vadeboncoeur, André Laurendeau, Claude Ryan, René Lévesque, Michel Chartrand, and virtually all his allies and friends of the forties and early fifties. But nationalism and separatism were another matter. In the early sixties, different attitudes on the “national” question were fraying and ending many old friendships. Trudeau’s correspondence and writings of the period reveal an erosion of the shared confidences and principles that had long marked good friendships. Sometimes, however, separatist sentiments did not break off relationships. When Carroll Guérin, for example, told Trudeau she thought the “French people” (she was “half French”) had an innate need to separate, her views did not affect their summer weeks of cherished intimacy. With men, however, it was different, and Trudeau remained troubled about the number of break-ups that occurred.

  On Remembrance Day 1992, Trudeau met with Camille Laurin, an old friend and an Outremont neighbour with whom he had shared long walks in the fifties. Laurin, a psychiatrist, had been the “father” in the 1970s of the Quebec language legislation that made Quebec officially unilingual and deeply offended Quebec federalists. Now, as they sat together again, Laurin recalled that he and Trudeau had once shared “the same goals of modernization and declericalization” and had fought a common “battle for liberty against dictatorship, cynicism, and political immorality.” As late as November 1961, Laurin had described separatism in Le Devoir as an illness. Using Freudian terms, he claimed that French Canadians saw the English as fathers and, thus, separatism was a form of revenge. Trudeau now asked Laurin what had made him change his mind. Lesage’s “revolution,” he answered. It had made him realize that federalism would not give Quebec the necessary tools to modernize. Trudeau replied that a strong team in Ottawa would open Quebec to the world while assuring modernization at home. Laurin demurred and pointed to the fate of the francophones in other provinces.60 It was an old debate, but one that was largely stilled among the
young professionals and intellectuals in the fifties by the common political cause they pursued. In the sixties, their common goals dissolved in political difference.

  Pierre Vadeboncoeur and François Hertel had been closer friends to Trudeau than either Pelletier or Marchand. Their increasing disagreements on the “national” issue, however, shattered the ties of friendship as Vadeboncoeur began to embrace nationalism, then separatism, and an ever more militant socialism. Vadeboncoeur placed the break in 1963–64, as the slogans of Quebec separatism burst out of university classrooms and bars, where students and fringe politicians met, and exploded into the mainstream of public debate. He recalled the moment when he decided that Trudeau and Pelletier were blind to the forces animating the young and the future. They were, he wrote, not “brutes” but simply blind: “Mr. Pelletier responded to me when I spoke of the existence of a current leading to independence: ‘But what current?’”61

  Vadeboncoeur believed that he and Trudeau took different paths mainly because Trudeau’s approach to political understanding drew so much on the law. In the 1940s, at law school, they had both regarded the law as a conservative force. They despised the law even as they dreamed of revolution, staged political theatre, and searched the streets at night for poetry and romance. Trudeau, he said, failed to understand the new world after 1960, one that was infected with “a massive contagion of political ideas, notably among the poets, the artists, and the best intellectuals of the country,” a contagion so powerful that the general population caught its exceptional strain. As they drifted apart, Vadeboncoeur was initially sad, wistful, and respectful of his friend’s integrity.